Abstract
SCHOOLTHY: Automatic Menu Planner for Healthy and Balanced School Meals is a decision support tool that addresses the multi-objective menu planning problem in order to automatically produce meal plans for school canteens. Malnutrition is a widespread problem nowadays and is particularly serious when it affects children. In our environment, nutrition experts design healthy and balanced meal plans for children manually, which leaves significant room for improvement in terms of convenience and efficiency. SCHOOLTHY is presented herein as a proposal to improve and facilitate the work of these professionals. We focus on offering healthy and balanced meal plans that not only satisfy the recommended energy and nutrient intakes, but that also have a minimum cost and maximum variety of courses and food groups. Quantitative analyses that compare the meal plans yielded by SCHOOLTHY for meal plans designed by experts at hand and served in regional schools demonstrate the suitability of the proposal. Finally, we note that, thanks to its flexibility, SCHOOLTHY might be easily adapted to deal with other environments, such as hospitals, prisons and retirement homes, among others.
Highlights
Nowadays, the problem of malnutrition is one that developed countries are not exempt from [1]
Segredo et al.: SCHOOLTHY: Automatic Menu Planner for Healthy and Balanced School Meals formulation of the Menu Planning Problem (MPP) [8], that we have termed as Multi-objective Menu Planning Problem (MMPP)
As far as we know, this is the first decision support tool proposed based on a multi-objective formulation of the MPP to automatically design meal plans through Evolutionary Computation (EC) for school contexts
Summary
The problem of malnutrition is one that developed countries are not exempt from [1]. The consumption of prepared and ultra-processed food with a very unfavourable nutritional quality, motivated by the current frenetic pace of life, is increasing [2], [3] This problem of malnutrition, due to either lack or excess of nutrients, is serious when it affects children. E. Segredo et al.: SCHOOLTHY: Automatic Menu Planner for Healthy and Balanced School Meals formulation of the Menu Planning Problem (MPP) [8], that we have termed as Multi-objective Menu Planning Problem (MMPP). A multi-objective formulation of the MPP focused on minimising the cost and the degree of repetition of courses and food groups that a meal plan consists of, and always satisfying the established nutritional requirements.
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